It’s Best to Stay Clear of Apple Siri Ports

Posted on December 5, 2011 12:45 PM by Rob Williams

One of the most talked about pieces of tech this season is Siri, the voice recognition system that Apple included on its iPhone 4S. For owners of the iPhone 4 or earlier, not being able to install Siri’s software on their phone is unfortunate, but as expected, many developers out there have been working on porting it over – to mixed levels of success.

The most recent go is “H1Siri” (Hi Siri), developed by a Chinese group calling themselves CD-Dev Team. While the software itself might work, there are some caveats that are worth taking into consideration, and in essence, this is something to steer clear of.

It seems that for H1Siri to work, it requires the use of copyrighted binaries that are only available on the iPhone 4S. Taking data like that and putting it on a device for which it was not designed might not be kosher according to the courts, so that’s the first sketchy thing to consider.

Second, it also appears that when using H1Siri, your information (including e-mail, contacts, calendar, location, et cetera) are or can be transferred to H1Siri’s home server. While the developers might not actually see the data or make use of it, do you really want to send over all of your personal data to Chinese hackers? I sure wouldn’t.

Unfortunately for those pre-iPhone 4S owners interested in Siri, the good options are about nil at this point. Apple is unlikely to ever back-port it, which is possibly understandable due to performance reasons. As TechCrunch perfectly states, “Guys, seriously…Siri is cool, but it’s definitely not worth all this.“.